A culture change is needed

Our collaboration with Max Fraser, now Editorial Director of Dezeen, for Clerkenwell Design Week where we explored the potential of recycled polystyrene

Listening and trying to learn from the feedback we have received since we closed TDO and launched New-works has been really interesting and valuable.

We see inherent problems with how our profession goes about being architects, which is separate from the architecture (although we argue if you improve the former you also improve the latter). New-works was founded to explore how we might address this, and there was a bit of a leap of faith involved.

We are openly saying that as a smaller practice we should specialise and collaborate through the work-stages. This goes against the general sense that the architect (singular) should do all the work-stages. 

By saying we will not do everything ourselves we know that we are letting go of precious fees we could pitch for. We are resisting the temptation to cross-sell and broaden our role on projects to maximise income. But we believe that by specialising in what we love doing and building teams of equally talented and excited people with different and complementary skills, that we can all perform better, and make more space for creativity and new thinking.

We set up New-works believing this, but some of the feedback we have received opened our eyes to things we did not appreciate:

Feedback from Architects

We have felt empowered by the support and encouragement of our friends and peers. I think we all feel nervous about our buildings being criticised, but we are all pretty openly critical of the culture around being an architect. Long hours, low pay, vast regulatory requirements, high levels of stress, poor mental health. It’s everywhere. We feel very strongly that all of us each trying to do everything ourselves compounds these issues. Our friends and peers have expressed near universal support for our exploration into changing how we work to address these issues. In a profession that can sometimes be cold, insular and self-referential it has been really wonderful to feel fellowship and love. 

Feedback from Clients

We were nervous telling our clients about these changes. I think as architects we tell ourselves that clients want us across all work-stages to retain the quality of the architecture. The feedback we have received is that they want the second half of that sentence - the quality of the architecture - and if they get that then the first half of the sentence is less important. What’s more important is their experience of the process.

Our profession often assumes we are competing with each other purely on the quality of architecture, the end product. The question of how we get there is less interesting - we just say we can do it all - full services. Asking our clients what a good architect looks like, they talk first about lived experience - what a good architect is like to work with - and second about their design flair. If we say that a better performing team exists in collaboration than one architect doing everything, that’s not as scary to them as we think it sounds. 

Feedback from Collaborators 

Marsha Ramroop posted on Linkedin about the fact we are proposing an inclusive model, which we had not really appreciated. 

Marsha very kindly came to New-works to talk more with us about this and we learned a lot about the prevalence of under-represented groups in small practice, and the reasons behind that. Specialising and collaborating creates opportunity for inclusion: Marsha’s enthusiasm and clarity of thought really opened our eyes to this.

We feel really excited by the agency which - to be honest - we were not aware we had to affect this change until we met with Marsha.

We are optimistic about the changes we have made in launching New-works, but what is becoming apparent is the prevalent model of architectural practice can’t be the future. A culture change is needed.

Tom Lewith, Founding Director, New-works